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http://tert.am/en/news/2011/09/15/haigmeliksetyan/?sw

 

 

Haig Meliksetyan, former US intelligence agent, says he could have stopped 9/11

13:03 • 15.09.11

 

 

 

 

Photo from the Daily Mail

 

Ten years after the 9/11 terrorist attack in the US, a former FBI intelligence operative, Haig Melkessetian, has unveiled new details which he says could have stopped the tragedy.

 

Speaking to the British Daily Mail on Sunday, the 44-year-old Christian Lebanese of Armenian descent revealed his story for the first time.

 

He told the paper that over the preceding two years, he had taken part in two separate investigations in the Middle East which might have thwarted the attacks – only to find his work dismissed as irrelevant.

 

He had identified the secret ‘hawala’ method which the hijackers would use to transfer money from al-Qaeda into their bank accounts, and the very office in the Persian Gulf they would use.

 

He also passed on to his bosses the real means by which the Taliban could be ousted and Bin Laden delivered up: by ‘buying off’ much of their tribal, military support. This was the very plan later deployed to defeat the Taliban - but only after the disaster of 9/11.

Ten years later, his bitter disappointment is as intense as ever. ‘I watched it unfold on TV,’ Melkessetian said. ‘I knew immediately that this was a terrorist attack. And my next thought was that this should never have happened.’

 

Meliksetyan who has been a naturalised US citizen since 1984 he has long inspired awe inside the secretive community of counterterrorism experts.

 

‘We see movie characters like James Bond and Jason Bourne, and we assume they’re simply fiction,’ says a former US State Department official who knows Melkessetian well.

 

Having moved to America, Melkessetian spent much of the 1990s at the US State Department, liaising with the world’s counterterrorist agencies. But he itched to get back to the field. In September, 1997, he flew into the US base at Al Dhafra in Abu Dhabi, his home for the next four years.

 

Officially, he was there as a linguist, attached to the Air Force Office of Special Investigation (AFOSI) and employed as a private contractor via a firm based in Maryland.

 

Melkessetian’s March 2000 official staff appraisal praised his ‘extensive knowledge of terrorist groups, membership and leadership,’ and his ‘unique ability’ at recruiting local sources. It added: ‘His role was the reason for gaining vital intelligence information, which was passed on to the highest levels of the US government.’

 

On September 12, 2001, the aviation agent called Melkessetian in Washington. ‘He told me the pilot had been in touch and wondered whether now we would want to team up.’ Melkessetian passed on his details to people in AFOSI headquarters who in turn contacted the CIA.

 

It wasn’t long after initially getting the map that one of Melkessetian’s contacts, a senior Gulf state police officer, gave him a tip. Al-Qaeda, he said, was using the hawala system - which leaves no paper trail – to send money to cells abroad. The hawala agent (known as a hawaladar) in, say, Afghanistan, will contact his counterpart somewhere else, and ask him to make a certain sum available to a named beneficiary.

 

Melkessetian’s contact told him he ought to pay particular attention to a branch of a local moneychanging firm in Sharjah: ‘So I went and did some digging. I sat in the shwarma [kebab] shop opposite, got talking to people, and visited the agency itself.

'It all checked out. In the back room they were using hawala to transfer money to and from remote areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan. In the front, they were doing ordinary money transfers to places like the Philippines.’

 

Melkessetian wrote an urgent report, drawing attention both to the moneychangers and the wider need to monitor hawala: ‘If we were interested in terrorist finance, this was a loophole that had to be closed.’

 

After 9/11, both the CIA and the 9/11 Commission inquiry established that not only was hawala used widely by al-Qaeda, but that two of the 9/11 pilots, Ziad Jarrah and Mohammed Atta, had used the Sharjah office which Melkessetian had identified.

 

Melkessetian was given a bitter reward for his prescience. Having left Abu Dhabi a month before 9/11, he spent September 18 working at AFOSI headquarters. Then, to his amazement, a senior officer informed him that ‘counter-intelligence issues’ had arisen, and that he was to leave and surrender his credentials immediately.

 

Finally cleared the following year, he used the Freedom of Information Act to learn he had been denounced by his own employer – the contracting firm Allworld Language Consultants (ALC). It had filed an official report claiming Melkessetian was a threat to national security, on the flimsy basis that he was an Arab and had resigned from his job in Abu Dhabi shortly before 9/11.

 

Meliksetyan spent the subsequent years as a private consultant.

 

‘Throughout all these experiences, most of the guys in the trenches have been awesome,’ Melkessetian said. ‘I am a patriot and I believe in the greatness of this nation. But there are also imposters who failed to stop 9/11, and others who took advantage of it and destroyed innocent people’s lives. To this day, no one is stopping them.’